Review: (Pray) Takes Ars Nova to Church Off-Broadway

Upon entering Greenwich House Theater for the Ars Nova/National Black Theatre production of (pray), you are immediately taken to church. The venue has been transformed by the design collective dots into a sanctuary, complete with pews, a makeshift altar, and faux stained-glass windows. More than just a scenic gesture, the piece is immersive in the truest sense, happening entirely around us within the rows and the aisles. Actors sit alongside us, chat and gossip with us, making us feel like congregants at a Black, Southern Baptist church. The play is structured as a service: we sing spiritual songs, bear witness to neighbors, hear readings, and even pass around collection baskets. The immersion is extremely successful.

The piece is created, directed, and choreographed by nicHi douglas, with music by S T A R R Busby and JJJJJerome Ellis. It features an ensemble of 13, Busby included. For the most part, the cast members play variations of the church’s first lady, Sister Anna Bertha, clad in elegant, embellished baby blue formalwear (costumes are by DeShon Elem).

One of the performers is separated out, lamenting that she does not have a church hat to wear like everyone else. As the piece goes on, this character wrestles with their faith and feelings about church. This journey is the thematic center of the piece, which in a broader sense explores the relationship Black women have with spirituality over generations, from the time of slavery to the present.

(pray) wants to have both cultural specificity and abstraction, and almost all traces of discernible theology have been removed. Jesus never comes up; various terms are oddly replaced — “God” becomes “Good,” “Amen” becomes “Again.” In a move toward inclusivity, douglas repeatedly uses the phrase “Black women and femmes.” I appreciate the expansiveness, though it is not actually realistic for this specific religious setting: How many Christian churches are actually accepting of femmes (be they gender nonconforming, expansive, trans, or nonbinary)? Likewise, two “readings” discuss the empowering role of Christianity for enslaved “Black women and femmes” in the 19^th century. Here, the terminology becomes both anachronistic and unrealistic.

The work ends with a song in which the ensemble transforms and welcomes the previously isolated character to join in communal healing. Titled “A New Apostles’ Creed,” it is true to its name, a list of beliefs that becomes a sort of spiritual manifesto. The lyrics range from the generically Christian (“I believe there exists a watching, caring, knowing energy beyond my five senses / I believe in the resurrection, death and resurrection of the living as enough reason to continue”) to vague self-help empowerment mantras (“I believe my existence is sufficient / I believe I’m fully equipped”).

The religion throughout is not only abstracted from theology, but from politics. In our contemporary moment, where Christian groups (like the Alliance Defense Freedom) are leading the attack on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, queer civil rights, and trans rights, I found it hard to accept (pray)’s overly positive, purposefully apolitical embrace of Christian spirituality. In many ways douglas is using surrealism and Afrofuturism to imagine a better version of church, but this often ignores the problems in the current version of church on offer. While it ends triumphantly asserting that church can be a positive space of community, which is absolutely true, its lack of conversation that the exact same church can be a place of exclusion, discrimination, and hatred is particularly dismaying.

It’s important to acknowledge my distance from this material–I recognize that, as a white person, I am an outsider in this space and it was not made with me in mind. Several Black women in the audience around me were moved to tears. Though I had some struggles with the material, I’m happy that (pray) can be an emotionally rewarding and cathartic experience for many.